Crack­down on tax evaders in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka’s In­land Rev­enue Depart­ment will carry out is­land-wide raids on busi­nesses to crack down on tax eva­sion, a lo­cal me­dia re­port said onWed­nes­day. Com­mis­sioner Gen­eral of the In­land Rev­enue Depart­ment, Kalyani Da­hanayake, was quoted in me­dia re­ports say­ing that the depart­ment’s aim was to widen the tax base and get peo­ple to pay their taxes. “We will be go­ing all over coun­try, even after of­fice hours, to bring in peo­ple who are not in the tax net,” she told a fo­rum on the govern­ment’s 2017 bud­get. Sri Lanka’s Fi­nanceMin­is­ter Ravi Karunanayake said the depart­ment had more than dou­bled the num­ber of tax files since the new govern­ment came to power in Jan­uary 2015, but many re­mained out­side the tax net.